The magazine industry has found an unlikely champion of diversity: Men’s Vogue. While other magazines shy away from putting African-Americans on the cover in the belief that they don’t sell as well, the new Conde Nast men’s magazine has devoted four of its 12 covers so far to black men: Tiger Woods, Barack Obama, Denzel Washington and, in December, Will Smith.Is this just a statistical anomaly, or is Men’s Vogue courting black readers the way corporate cousin Details cultivates a gay audience: not exclusively, but purposefully?

The impact of the U.S. mortgage market crisis on the underlying economy could be “dramatic” as leveraged investors may need to scale back lending by up to $2 trillion, according to investment bank Goldman Sachs (GS.N).In a report dated November 15, Goldman’s chief U.S. economist Jan Hatzius said a “back-of-the-envelope” estimate of credit losses on outstanding mortgages, based on past default experience, was around $400 billion.

Seagate Technology LLC has shipped Maxtor disk drives that contain Trojan horses that upload data to a pair of Chinese Web sites, the Taiwanese government’s security service warned this weekend.The Investigation Bureau, a part of the Ministry of Justice that’s responsible for both internal security and foreign threats, said it suspected mainland China’s authorities were responsible for planting the malware on the drives at the factory. “The bureau said that the method of attack was unusual, adding that it suspected Chinese authorities were involved,” a story posted by the English-language Taipei Times reported Sunday. “Sensitive information may have already been intercepted by Beijing through the two Web sites, the bureau said.”

Seagate confirmed today that some Maxtor Basics 3200 drives were infected out of the box, but the company said it had no proof that the Chinese government was involved. “We discovered that a contract manufacturer had introduced a virus onto the drives during assembly,” said Forrest Monroy, a Seagate spokesman, in an e-mail. “We have no indication, nor any reason to believe, that there is any government involvement in the virus issue.”

The biofuels bonanza will crash unless producers can guarantee their crops have been produced responsibly, the UN’s environment agency chief has said.Achim Steiner of the UN Environment Programme (Unep) said there was an urgent need for standards to make sure rainforests weren’t being destroyed.

Biofuel makers also had to show their products did not produce more CO2 than they negated, he told BBC News.

Critics say biofuels will lead to food shortages and destroy rainforests.

They point to the destruction of Indonesia’s peat swamps as an example of biofuel folly.

The swamps are one the richest stores of carbon on the planet and they are being burned to produce palm oil.

Mr Steiner implied that because of Indonesia’s inability to police its land use, biofuels from palm oil grown by the nation might never be deemed to be sustainable.

But he said some biofuels could be considered sustainable. He highlighted ethanol production in Brazil, and a dry land crop called jatropha, which is resistant to pests and droughts.

It’s in the best interest of the US to have Detroit leading the way and generating the car that people want to buy. That means jobs and money flowing in the US economy. It’s also in the best interest of the US and the world to address global warming. Who knows if this is the future, but I’d like to see US automakers delivering stories like this one of these days.

Could a strange substance found by an Ark-La-Tex man be part of secret government testing program? That’s the question at the heart of a phenomenon called “Chemtrails.” In a KSLA News 12 investigation, Reporter Jeff Ferrell shows us the results of testing we had done about what’s in our skies. “It seemed like some mornings it was just criss-crossing the whole sky. It was just like a giant checkerboard,” described Bill Nichols. He snapped several photos of the strange clouds from his home in Stamps, in southwest Arkansas. Nichols said these unusual clouds begin as normal contrails from a jet engine. But unlike normal contrails, these do ‘not’ fade away.

Soon after a recent episode he saw particles in the air. “We’d see it drop to the ground in a haze,” added Nichols. He then noticed the material collecting on the ground.

“This is water and stuff that I collected in bowls. I had it sitting out in my backyard in my dad’s pick-up truck,” said Nichols as he handed us a mason jar in the KSLA News 12 parking lot back in September after driving down from Arkansas.

KSLA News 12 had the sample tested at a lab. The results: A high level of barium, 6.8 parts per million, (ppm). That’s more than three times the toxic level set by the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA.

Armed with these lab results about the high levels of barium found in our sample, we decided to contact the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. They told us that, ‘yes,’ these levels are very unusual. But at the same time they added the caveat that proving the source is a whole ‘nother matter.

We discovered during our investigation that Barium is a hallmark of other chemtrail testing. This phenomenon even attracted the attention of a Los Angeles network affiliate, which aired a report entitled, “Toxic Sky?”

Fine company we’re in there, makes me prouder’n hell to have such barbaric murderers making policy in this country.Forget all the moral arguments against the death penalty, although there are plenty of those. Put aside the obvious implications of the possibility that innocent people could be mistakenly executed. It’s true but only tangential to the subject that it costs a lot more money to go through the long appeals process in capitol offense cases than to just incarcerate prisoners for life.

All these reasons to eliminate the death penalty can be debated ad nauseum but there’s one overriding reason to get rid of it from civilized society.

You should never, ever allow the government to have the power to kill the citizens. Because it will, in ever increasing numbers, for an ever increasing number of reasons.

Even Dianne Feinstein broke with her Republican masters last night to send the telecom bill to the full Senate without immunity for the telecommunications companies that have illegally spied on Americans. It’s clear that Republicans will try to add an amendment restoring such immunity, but Chris Dodd has already stated he will filibuster, thereby requiring Republicans to somehow garner 60 votes to pass it.

Without sleep, the emotional centers of our brains dramatically overreact to bad experiences, research now reveals.“When we’re sleep deprived, it’s really as if the brain is reverting to more primitive behavior, regressing in terms of the control humans normally have over their emotions,” researcher Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told LiveScience.

Anyone who has ever gone without a good night’s sleep is aware that doing so can make a person emotionally irrational. While past studies have revealed that sleep loss can impair the immune system and brain processes such as learning and memory, there has been surprisingly little research into why sleep deprivation affects emotions, Walker said.

a few years ago in japan, members of the hokkaido industrial research institute started carving thousands of very precise grooves into nearby roads. the slightly loopy brainwave belonged to a mr. shinoda, a guy who accidentally cut a road in several places with a digger and then later drove over the damage in his car. He realised that with some planning and time to kill he could create rows of grooves which, when driven over at a certain speed, would ‘play a tune’.

I can see from these posts that you need a little more of Friday’s “cure”. I realize it’s the weekend, but please make sure you get plenty of sleep.

About Dizzy Dezzi

Feisty, 30-something, mother of three, wife to Iraq Vet (currently performing Deployment 3.0), home-school mom for 10+ years, and small business owner. Politically, I lean a little liberal, but a lot Libertarian. I may not always say what's on my mind, but when I do have something to say, you can't shut me the heck up...

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